scot47

News of a British f+emale murdered there. Do not go there. Dangrous. Seek your kicks on travels closer to home.

dfjordan

Lion in Winter

That's exactly the area of Guatemala where I was back in the early 90s. Then it was army and Civil Patrols and US-backed dictatorship - now those people have just become thugs and drug runners. It's very sad. It's an extraodinarily beautiful country that has had a very hard time of it.

Gordon Barlow

My son lived there for a time in the early 2000s, in a treehouse just outside San Marcos, on the other (northern) side of the lake from San Pedro, and later managed a hostel/hotel there for a couple of months with a girlfriend and her baby girl in the village itself. Lots of hippies lived in the villages, mostly in San Pedro, which is where this young hippie girl disappeared from. The native Mayans were friendly and peaceful; and there aren't any Mayans (or not many) mixed up in the drugs and violence of the cities, except as victims. Guatemala City is dangerous - no doubt about it - but Atitlan is a wonderful place. My knowledge of the place is ten years later than yours. In the later years, there were no Civil Patrols. Panajachel - the town at the near-end of the lake - and its vicinity are on our list of possible retirement-places.

Lion in Winter

Panajachel was the hippy hangout when I was there (I went there for a shower once, there being no running water where I was), but I was in a tiny hamlet about an hour's walk up into the mountains from Solola which has a big military base and it was soldiers from there, in addition to a Civil Patrol, who were implicated in the kidnap and torture of the guy I went there with to help him get back (partially disabled) after treatment in the US. Thank god that stuff is over now. It's a spectacularly beautiful place and the people are lovely as you say. Has compulsory military service stopped? It was a big problem when I was there because they took people for service from the villages and brutalized them, including making them kill people from their own villages to completely disconnect them from their roots - no way back.

Gordon Barlow

Here is a news report of the death of the young hippie. It seems that it's quite possible she was high on drugs and fell off the cliff, and not murdered at all.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-accident.html

Gordon Barlow

I think that must have been in the times of the quasi-genocide of the indigenous Mayans supervised by Oliver North & Elliott Abrams and the CIA. (Here below is a 20-minute interview that covers that scandal, for those interested.)
By the early 2000s there was none of that, as far as I can gather. The survivors of the massacres were surprisingly tolerant of the young Americans in the hippie communities - although they no doubt recognised that the hippies didn't share the same ethical standards of behaviour as the CIA savages.

Lion in Winter

Yes it was. The 80s and into the early 90s were appalling times. I have several friends who were (barely) surivivors of it. It wasn't terribly quasi either - a couple of hundred thousand estimated killed in a country with a population of less than 10 million at the time, just form the 80s. A lot more wen on before that, ever since the US-sponsored coup. On top of the killings and the terror, I remember seeing billboards there in the Mayan communities advertising female sterilization as "reversible birth control". And the actions of companies such as Pepsi and United Fruit were something else again. I expect it is still the case though that 2% of the population (or agribusiness) owns over 90% of the productive land.

spouse of scouse

For those who prefer to read a less trashy and more credible newpaper report, the young woman may have gone to see the sunrise, become disoriented due to fasting, and fallen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-...shire-47539062

scot47

Many of us with children of that age group feel for the parents. Watching your children destroy themselves - and others - with drugs and alcohol is painful.